That Was The Lunch That Was

If you were a nerd growing up in the 60s, you lived in worship of Tom Lehrer, the Harvard mathematician who rolled his love of musical theater in the top topics of the day, resulting in some of the most clever and timeless musical satire ever produced.  Think Weird Al mixed with Stephen Colbert.  This was the generation before nerds found a safe haven in Comic-Con, when rambling off the Elements to the tune of the Major-General’s Song from Pirates of Penzance was a geek’s mating ritual.   Long before YouTube, we would huddle around a turntable and replay track after track on long-playing records, trying to commit the lyrics to memory until they would roll trippingly from our own tongues.  You never knew when you might need to break into a gory rendition of the Masochism Tango or I Hold Your Hand in Mine at a National Honor Society meeting.

Lehrer captured the conscience of our day.  While writing songs for the television show “That Was the Week That Was,” he provided biting commentary on everything from New Math to Vatican II.  He skewered Wernher von Braun, who cut his scientific teeth working for the Nazis before becoming an American rocket scientist.  (“Vonce da rockets are up, who cares vhere dey come down?  It’s not my de-pahtment!” says Wernher von Braun.)  Often censored by the networks, Lehrer eventually cut his own record of the original songs called “That Was the Year That Was.”

As a Harvard freshman, it was no surprise to find that I was not alone in revering Tom Lehrer.  On that campus, he was as popular as Justin Bieber at a Barbie convention.  One day, a bunch of us were sitting around listening to Tom Lehrer songs when I suggested we call him up and ask him to lunch.  One of the record jackets stated that although he taught Math and Performing Arts at UC-Santa Cruz, he preferred to spend his autumns in Cambridge.  I opened the phone book and he was listed.  One proper gentleman in our group thought it unseemly that a young lady should call and ask a man to lunch.  But in the absence of any male takers, I dialed the phone.  The voice that answered was clearly Tom Lehrer himself.  After catching my breath, I explained that we were a bunch of freshman who admired him and wondered if he would allow us to take him to lunch.  His response:  “Would Friday at 1 work for you?”

None of us really thought about what would happen next.  We had no questions prepared, no real purpose for the lunch.  We gathered at a large round table at the Chinese Restaurant across the street and awaited his arrival.  An unremarkable-looking man resembling his own photos walked in.  He found our table and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Tom.”  We were star struck.  For what seemed like an eternity, we shuffled in nervous silence.  I’m not sure if we were expecting him to break into song, or a comedy routine, but clearly he was not going to entertain us.  Slowly, we emerged from our collective paralysis.  It was a lovely lunch.  He did not reveal any answers to the secrets that have fueled the urban legends over the years, such as why he stopped performing so abruptly.  He tutored us on the correct pronunciation of "Santa Cruz" (Sanacrus).  He talked about the beauty of autumn in New England.  He asked about the current faculty in the Harvard music department.   He told us that one of his best friends asked him to perform for his 50^th birthday party.  His response was, “I’ll do it for $50,000, which is my way of saying I won’t do it.”

Tom Lehrer, despite his genius and cult status across nerdkind, is a very real and sensitive human being.  I can believe that after a hundred or so performances of the same material he was simply bored and did not want to do it anymore.   There is something exhausting about being “on” all the time; it was this very feeling that pushed me away from a career as a musician.   He made his mark on a generation, however.  He took a difficult era in our history and made us laugh and think twice about what we were doing.  And he created a body of work that endures, if not in its political relevance today, at least as a first-person account of an important era in American history. 

Today at the age of 83, Tom Lehrer still lives in Cambridge, a place where genius is so ubiquitous he can run wild among his own kind, unrecognized.

Tomorrow's blog:  Helping My Son to Seize the Day